A Companion to John Dewey's "Democracy and Education"

Resumen

This year marks the centenary publication of John Dewey’s magnum opus, Democracy and Education. Despite its profound importance as a foundational text in education, it is notoriously difficult and—dare we say it—a little dry. In this charming and often funny companion, noted philosopher of education D. C. Phillips goes chapter by chapter to bring Dewey to a twenty-first-century audience. Drawing on over fifty years of thinking about this book—and on his own experiences as an educator—he lends it renewed clarity and a personal touch that proves its lasting importance.

Phillips bridges several critical pitfalls of Democracy and Education that often prevent contemporary readers from fully understanding it. Where Dewey sorely needs a detailed example to illustrate a point—and the times are many—Phillips steps in, presenting cases from his own classroom experiences. Where Dewey casually refers to the works of people like Hegel, Herbart, and Locke—common knowledge, apparently, in 1916—Phillips fills in the necessary background. And where Dewey gets convoluted or is even flat-out wrong, Phillips does what few other scholars would do: he takes Dewey to task. The result is a lively accompaniment that helps us celebrate and be enriched by some of the most important ideas ever offered in education.

Introduction: John Dewey and Me

I first met John Dewey in 1958, some six years after his death. It was a brief encounter, and it was far from auspicious. I was a newly minted graduate in the sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia, undertaking a yearlong program to become a qualified high school science teacher, and one of the required courses was a survey of great figures in the history of educational thought. And there he was—a far from imposing figure whose photograph reminded me of President Harry Truman, and his writings were quite incomprehensible. How, for example, could a (very) young biology-teacher-in-training glean much from the following passage from chapter 20 of Democracy and Education (1916): The interest in experience as a means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the mind as purely receptive. . . . For the mind to take a hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate true knowledge—to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of receptivity. It was only much later that I came to comprehend this point. I also recall assiduously pouring over, all those years ago, the summaries that Dewey provided at the end of each chapter of this book—no doubt in an attempt to be helpful to his readers. Unfortunately, at the time they merely added to my bemusement. I felt the need for a guiding hand, for a companion—but alas, none was forthcoming.¹

The situation was not quite so bleak as the reflections above might make it seem. I had taken a yearlong course in history and philosophy of science as part of my undergraduate studies, and the major focus of my degree had been in biology, with a strong emphasis on vertebrate anatomy, physiology, and evolution—and I was amazed to find that this background provided an entrée to Dewey. By a strange quirk of fate Dewey had been born in the very same year in which was published the book that was perhaps of greatest influence on him. For 1859 saw the arrival of both Dewey and Darwin’s Origin of Species. This link between Dewey and me leapt out as I read the short preface to Democracy and Education (a matter that I will discuss in more detail after a few preliminary issues have been attended to).

After my year of teacher training, I was too busy learning how to survive in the classroom to pursue this nascent interest in Dewey, and to be frank, a great disincentive was the bad impression I had formed of him as an English-language stylist. After a few years, however, my view of him started to change when I came across a passage, in brilliant prose, that threw light on an experience I had undergone during my teacher training. The program at the University of Melbourne had an interesting structure: a month or so of lectures and seminars at the university, followed by a three-week teaching round during which us trainees went out to teach, under supervision, in a high school; this was followed by another period of work at the university, which in turn was followed by another teaching round. My memory is that there were three such cycles in total, and the three schools to which we were sent were deliberately varied; the range included academically oriented schools, private schools with both boarders and day students, Catholic schools, schools in tough urban settings, and so on. The experience that was so memorable for me occurred on the first day of my second teaching round.

I had been posted to a prestigious private school of venerable age (in England, by some perverse foible of the English language, this would have been called a greater public school), and on my first morning I followed my assigned master teacher to observe him at work with a class that I would be teaching for the next three weeks. The classroom was horrendous! It probably had been state of the art at the end of the nineteenth century, with its very small desks screwed firmly to the floor—and adding to the horror was the fact that I had to squeeze my almost six-foot frame into one of them at the back of the room. And there I sat for almost an hour, praying that fire did not break out, for I knew that I would never be able to escape in time. Here is the passage from Dewey that I found so enlightening; it had been written many decades earlier, for chapter 2 of The School and Society (1900/1915), about the time the classroom that so horrified me was built:

Just as the biologist can take a bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just space enough to hold books, pencils, and paper, and add a table, some chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. It is all made for listening—because simply studying lessons out of a book is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind upon another.

Made for listening! What an insight—not made for working in, or to facilitate active inquiry, or even to allow communication with fellow learners. Students were effectively forced into the role of spectators. I found that Dewey had further insights about this in Democracy and Education, as we will see later.

In the years that followed, I discovered more passages, also in impressive prose, that threw light on my classroom teaching experiences; and furthermore, some of the originally murky passages began to move into focus. I realized they were expressing important and extremely interesting, though often debatable, philosophical insights about matters such as how humans gain reliable knowledge, the mind in its relation to the body, the relation between the individual and his or her community, and how moral progress can occur. Throughout, however, I refrained from romanticizing Dewey—and to be frank, some passages in his writings remain murky after half a century of study, and sometimes his arguments seem weak or even malformed. But after all, Dewey was human.

I embarked on deeper study of philosophy and the history of educational thought at the University of Melbourne, and eventually wrote a master’s thesis on the different ways in which Herbert Spencer (the influential nineteenth-century British essayist) and Dewey used the theory of evolution; and in 1968 I earned my doctorate for a dissertation on the ways in which holist or organicist ideas (originating in Hegel’s philosophy) played out in Dewey’s writings. The struggles to be clear and precise in this dissertation on a difficult topic made me sympathetic to the struggles Dewey must have had in attempting to be clear when formulating his philosophy, and I was prepared to live with some defective passages in his writings. In 1974 I left Australia to take up a position at Stanford, where for many years I taught a course (listed both in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Philosophy) titled The Philosophical and Educational Thought of John Dewey.

Over the passing years, I accumulated a number of different editions of Democracy and Education (hereafter usually referred to as D&E). This book was the centerpiece of my courses; it had been written in 1915 and first published in 1916, and was (and is still) regarded by many scholars as Dewey’s major work in an impressive corpus of about forty books and eight hundred essays and papers. My copies of D&E gradually became filled with marginal notes written in pencil that accumulated as I worked with my Stanford students. At some point I realized that these notes constituted the skeleton for a companion to Democracy and Education—the work that I had so much desired all those decades ago.

Why a Companion?

Up to this point, I have suggested that it is the difficulty of much, but certainly not all, of Dewey’s prose that makes it useful to have assistance in unraveling matters. In general, as many commentators have remarked, Dewey was not a good writer, but it must also be noted that he wrote D&E when he was in his midfifties, and his prose style had matured long before, in the closing decade or two of the nineteenth century. As a result, there are many passages that seem ponderous and pose difficulty for the reader in the twenty-first century—although it also has been noted that there are some scattered passages in his works that read like rousing lay sermons. Herman Harrell Horne, in the companion to D&E that he wrote in 1932, pulls no punches when he elaborates on the stylistic difficulty of Dewey’s prose:

the use of familiar words with unfamiliar meanings; the use of words with pregnant meanings; the use of long, involved, and highly concentrated sentences . . . ; the development of different important ideas in the same paragraph; and not making it clear when he is stating the views of others and when his own. . . . In addition, Dr. Dewey, like Browning, knows and takes for granted in his references as known so much history which his readers do not know and which future followers of his pragmatic educational theories are likely to know less and less. (pp. xiii–xiv)

There is enough here to justify writing a companion!

However, there are three additional reasons why it is a good idea not to make the journey into Democracy and Education alone. First, the book is a century old; and while this is cause for celebration, it is also a source of difficulty—for some of the issues that Dewey discusses are ones that we are no longer familiar with. Some help may be required to fully comprehend the point of some of Dewey’s discussions.

Second, at several places in the book Dewey puts forward a revolutionary way of thinking about the topic in hand—he turns the conventional approach on its head. And this can be quite puzzling for the reader who, quite naturally, is approaching the topic with the conventional conceptual equipment. For example, in several chapters toward the middle of the book Dewey rejects the traditional way of thinking about thinking. Without stealing the thunder from my (and Dewey’s) later and more detailed discussions, it is safe to say that most of us approach the topic of thinking with the assumption (the self-evident assumption!) that it is a mental process that takes place inside one’s head. Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker is the classical epitome of this; he is sitting quietly in deep reflection, alone, without pen or paper or electronic tablet, even without clothes. It is clear that he is, indeed, thinking. But as we will see later in this companion, Dewey will have none of this!

Third, Dewey—although a scholar of great learning—only very rarely made use of the usual scholarly mechanisms of citations and direct quotations (in the entire—and lengthy—volume he only mentions seven sources); so again it is useful to have at hand a companion to provide some of the scholarly context of Dewey’s discussions. An interesting example of this issue is his treatment of the philosophical tradition to which he clearly belonged when D&E was written—he was a pragmatist, yet this term is only referenced twice in the index to the book, and the two great founding figures of this philosophical movement, C. S. Peirce and William James, are not referenced at all (although James is named within the volume). The fact of the matter was that Dewey had taken a course in logic from Peirce, and in various other writings he acknowledged the great inspiration James had been for him (and James in turn had been inspired by Peirce).

Finally, it is interesting to note in passing that another great twentieth-century philosopher, whose influence is often regarded as comparable to that of Dewey—namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein—also avoided notes and quotations; the philosopher Max Black did a great service by writing A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,which helped fill in the scholarly gaps.

The Structure of This Companion

There are at least two essential features that must be possessed by a genuine companion. First, he, she, or it should be with you at every stage of the journey. A companion who disappears at crucial points is a sham, a fair-weather friend. This will not be the case here; this particular companion will contain discussions of every chapter of D&E in the order in which they appear in the original. And just as D&E opens with a brief preface, so will this companion open with a discussion of this short two-paragraph item.

The second essential feature for a companion is that he, she, or it should be interesting. A boring companion will not be with you very long before a parting of the ways! Hence in this companion the style—to the degree possible—is straightforward and conversational in tone. Furthermore, perhaps nothing is more tedious for a reader entering new territory (especially territory as initially daunting as D&E might seem) than to be confronted many times in each paragraph by detailed scholarly notes and references that at their worst can be incredibly cumbersome—it is a strange intellect that is turned on by prose that is characterized by frequent use of ibid,op. cit., "Dewey, Middle Works, vol. 14, p. 34, and the like. This is particularly a problem for a discussion of D&E; there now is a standard" edition published by Southern Illinois University Press, a volume that is merely one among several dozen that constitute its Collected Works of John Dewey series. But there are many other editions of D&E available in circulation, in libraries, and on the web. Unfortunately, because of differences in type size and layout, and the length of an editor’s introduction, the pagination of these editions is surprisingly different. And, as I discovered in my Stanford classes, nothing is more aggravating than having one person referring to a passage on page 20 when this passage does not appear on page 20 of the edition used by others, or on page 19 or page 21. (A concrete example is the quotation from chapter 20 given at the outset. I possess three different editions of D&E, and this passage appears on page 276, page 312, and pages 267–68!) Having no control over which edition of D&E each reader of this companion uses, I wish to avoid this type of annoyance, and therefore in draconian fashion I do not cite the page numbers at all, but simply refer to the chapter, and occasionally to the approximate location within the chapter, of the passage being discussed. This should not be the source of serious problems for, after all, the reader should be reading a copy of D&E (any copy of it) alongside this companion—this is the whole point. To aid interested readers in pursuing topics in more depth, however, I do include at the very end of the volume a brief bibliographical essay.

Cautionary Note

There is a final, very important message to the reader before the journey into D&E commences: This volume is a companion, and not a summary or replacement. Its purpose is to provide pointers, background, help, and commentary pointing out issues that interested readers need to pursue further for themselves. This book is not intended to offer, and does not provide, a précis of Democracy and Education that one can read in place of the original. Rather, it is meant to make the journey of discovery into this remarkable book even more fruitful than it would be if undertaken alone. Furthermore, like many journeys into foreign territory, progress will be a tad easier if the reader has a sense of the terrain in advance—it is a good idea to read or at least scan each chapter of D&E before using the guidebook.

Acknowledgements

Over the decades, my exploration of Dewey’s work has been enriched by comments from colleagues and students on several continents. Barbara Falk and Elizabeth Gasking, of the University of Melbourne, guided my early efforts at scholarly